YouTube celebrity speaks at CHAT festival

Since the launch of his YouTube video “Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us,” cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch has become a YouTube celebrity through his exploration of the effects of new media on society and culture.

The Kansas State University professor spoke Thursday about rethinking the use of new media in his speech titled “From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Why ‘critical thinking’ is not enough.”

The speech was part of the Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology festival at UNC.

During the speech, Wesch explained how media has changed over the years.

He said the new media landscape is editable, meaning people can change it if they don’t like the way it is.

“We need to make sure it is something we want it to be,” he said of new media, like video and the Internet.

He wants students to become “knowledge-able” by having them find information and then analyze and criticize it.

Wesch has already done this in his classrooms at Kansas State. He has had his students create videos, write blog posts and collaborate on papers through Google Documents.

Instead of laying out a plan for the audience to follow, Wesch’s speech was inspiring to listeners.

Audience member Ashley Hall, a graduate student in the English Department at UNC, said she has been following Wesch since the launch of his “Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us” video. She said his videos have influenced her in graduate school and in her classroom.

“One of my goals of teaching is to have students think about engaging in conversation with the work they are producing, and I think he does a great job of that,” she said.

Hall has used Wesch’s videos in her classroom and has seen her students move past the critical phase and into the productive phase, meaning they are responding to the video rather than just receiving it.

For one of his classes, Wesch required his students to create and edit a video of themselves performing random acts of kindness.

Unlike a bluebook exam, Wesch said that this wasn’t an assignment that could be tossed in the trash when finished. The video was posted on YouTube and students were able to see how they are contributing to the world.

Erich Werner, a graduate student in the English department, said he had also seen Wesch’s videos before.

 Werner said he tries to implement Wesch’s ideas into his role as an English professor.

Instead of listening to him lecture at the lectern, Werner said he wants his students to learn through doing and collaboration.

Werner said that Wesch provides challenging questions for teachers working at the college level.

“It’s not a question of new insights but of degree,” he said. “He challenges us to take those principles that are already in the writing program and to take them to the next level.”

 

Contact the Arts Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.